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“We need to target where we invest the money and we need to find the right amount of money to resolve the issues as floods are happening on a more frequent basis," said Leek. "The challenge with an area like London is that you have so many impermeable surfaces, and also people are converting cellars now so there is a large amount of people living below ground level. We are looking to help people become more resilient so its a lot of work.
“In a design aspect, with all the recent flood events, coastal river and ground water flooding we may want to look at the design data that we use. We may need to consider only looking at data [such as average rainfall] over the past 10 to 15 years, rather than the data from earlier on.
“The climate is changing so quickly that the more recent data may be more meaningful. Do we change some of the design standard to reflect the changes in rainfall and changes to the climate.”
The issue for the UK and many European countries is whether the cities, many of whom have medieval or even Roman origins, have the right designs to cope with the influx of rain in such a short space of time.
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